Home

Once Upon a Feather: A Field Guide to Fantastic Birds

Once upon a time, there were birds…

Humans have been fascinated by birds for hundreds of years. People in all different parts of the world and from different cultures have featured birds in their mythologies, legends, and folklore, sometimes giving them supernatural abilities and appearances. What did these birds look like? Once Upon a Feather brings thirty of these birds to life with full-color illustrations and cool facts about each one’s life history, behavior, range and role in stories. A fantastic introduction to the endlessly exciting worlds of mythology and ornithology!

Once Upon a Feather invites you to meet all kinds of amazing birds! Want to know more about…

…the Fenghuang, a pheasant-like bird from Chinese mythology that symbolizes balance and whose appearance foretells an era of harmony?

…the Bennu Heron, a wading bird from Egyptology that inspired the modern-day stories of the Western Phoenix?

…the Yaffingale Woodpecker, a special Green Woodpecker variant whose drumming and calls bring rain across Europe?

These and 27 other birds are waiting for you inside this fantastic field guide. Complete with range maps, cool facts, and photographs, this book will help you learn all about fantastic birds while helping you understand the connections between birds of myth and living birds.

The idea for Once Upon a Feather: a Field Guide to Fantastic Birds came about while I was writing a college paper on the symbolic connection between the Greek deity Zeus and living eagles. During my research, I came upon dozens of birds in mythology that all sounded amazing. As an artist and birder, I had to know- what did they look like? To my dismay, I could find very few visual descriptions for any of these birds. So, I decided to go about filling in the blanks by creating anatomically plausible illustrations for mythological birds. I based my creations on field research, literary research, and oral traditions. The result is a a book packed with over sixty paintings and amazing facts about fantastic birds from not only stories, but birds that exist in real life as well.

Some fantastic thank-yous!

Funding to complete this project and to conduct my field research in Japan and South Korea was generously provided by the William C. Mullen Foundation. Professor Mullen was the incredible mythology teacher at Bard College who inspired my paper on Zeus and eagles in 2012. Both the beginning and completion of this project could not have happened without him!

List of Legends

The launch of Once Upon a Feather was made possible thanks to some truly amazing people who supported this project through Kickstarter. I cannot thank you enough for helping to make this project a reality!